


honey, i only appear (so i can fade away)

by Anonymous



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cheating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Eventual Happy Ending, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Haunting, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mpreg, Murder, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Protective Shane Madej, Psychological Horror, Scared Ryan Bergara, Shane Madej Sees Ghosts, Sharing a Bed, Suicide, Trans Ryan Bergara, Unplanned Pregnancy, Violence, a frankly obnoxious but canon-typical amount of movie references, the following tags don't directly affect shane or ryan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:47:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25008700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “We have a rule about sex in a haunted house,” Ryan reminded him, letting his eyes slip shut and making no effort to stop him, “and the rule is we don’t do it.”“Yeah, but we’ve broken that rule more times than we’ve actually stuck to it.”Ryan and Shane bring home a little more than they bargained for after taking a detour to a haunted hotel.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 12
Kudos: 58
Collections: Anonymous, Daddy Month





	honey, i only appear (so i can fade away)

**Author's Note:**

> There's some pretty graphically-described talk of murder and suicide while discussing people that have died and are now haunting a hotel. As I said for my last fic, it's probably not much worse than something you'd hear in the average episode of True Crime, but if those are potentially triggering topics, be careful with this fic.
> 
> None of the original characters or locations in this fic are meant to resemble any real people or places.

“If a moose ran out in the road and I had to stomp on the brakes right now, your spine would snap like a twig.”

Shane, strangely unbothered by the idea of his potential paralysis, ignored Ryan and didn’t move his boot-clad feet from the dashboard as he continued to record from the passenger seat. “I don't even think there are any moose in California.”

“You say that because we’re city slickers. Everyone knows all the moose are up here in the mountains.”

“Five bucks says there aren't any.”

“You’re on.” With a glance at the empty road stretching on ahead through a hazy veil of falling snow, Ryan picked up his phone and tapped out a quick internet search.

“Texting and driving?” Shane tsked from behind the camera. “You’re setting a terrible example for your fans.”

“I haven’t seen another car for an hour, Shane. The only thing we have to worry about are the moose you claim don’t exist.” Ryan waited for the results to pop up, then hurriedly said, “Well, there’s no WiFi up here anyway, so—”

“What, you don’t have data?” Shane asked suspiciously, peeking over Ryan’s shoulder before he could lock his phone. “It says right there!”

“It says, ‘ _Many people don’t realize there are moose in California_ ,’ you long-necked asshole.” 

“That’s an Instagram caption for a half-naked girl in moose antlers, Ryan!”

It was, but Ryan would be damned if he was going to admit that. He dropped the phone, and if Shane asked why, he would insist he was afraid of driving into a snowbank if he kept his eyes diverted any longer. “Even if you’re right—and you’re not—friends aren’t supposed to get excited about taking money from each other. Not until it’s me taking it from you when I prove there are moose up here.”

“You know what sounds tasty right now? Moose Tracks ice cream.”

“How can you even think about ice cream when it’s thirty degrees out, dude?”

“I’m from Chicago, baby! I never get cold!” Shane exclaimed, joyfully taking any opportunity to remind Ryan that he was a Midwesterner. “And hey, if you’re not in the mood for Moose Tracks, we could have some chocolate _mousse_.”

“Not even spelled the same way.”

“You think I don’t know how to spell mousse?”

Ryan reached over and batted a hand at Shane’s knee in an attempt to change the subject. “Moose or no moose, stop ignoring the part about snapping like a twig.”

Almost impossibly smug, Shane set the camera aside and lowered his unnaturally long legs with slow, exaggerated movements Ryan couldn’t help watching, even when he would rather not give him the satisfaction.

“Could you be a little less distracting while I’m driving in a snowstorm?” He muttered under his breath. 

He immediately regretted saying anything at all when Shane took the opportunity to stretch a leg across Ryan’s lap instead. “What’s that, Ryan? I'm _distracting_ you?”

“Do you _want_ to die in a fiery crash?”

“On road trips? Yeah, most of the time.”

Despite his self-destructive claims, it was clear that Shane had something else on his mind as he brushed his foot against the seam at Ryan’s crotch. Ryan, whose face had grown several degrees warmer, turned off the dashboard camera before pushing Shane’s leg back to his side of the vehicle. “First of all, not as sexy in those heavy-ass boots,” he explained, “and no matter how you feel about dying, I’m still trying to drive.”

He couldn’t be sure which made Shane reconsider a misguided attempt at a footjob through a hiking boot, but he kept his leg to himself. There was a spark in the air, however, when Ryan peeked at his partner-slash-boyfriend out of the corner of his eye, and he knew their investigation would have to wait long enough for them to have a quickie under the guise of 'settling into their room' and 'unpacking' before they could get any actual work done.

“You’re gonna love this place,” Ryan said, swallowing imperceptibly and keeping his eyes fixed on the road. “It looks really fancy from the pictures I saw online, kind of has a _Shining_ vibe going on.”

“You know a _Shining_ vibe is a bad thing, right?” Shane said dryly.

“It’s huge,” Ryan pressed on as if Shane hadn’t spoken. “Has a gym, an indoor basketball court, three pools, a ski slope and a nature trail. I texted TJ when we stopped for gas and he said it’s nicer than any place we’ve ever ghosthunted in.”

He and Shane had lagged behind the rest of the crew, who, according to TJ, had already started setting up equipment in preparation for their arrival. It wasn’t uncommon for them to drive to shooting locations by themselves even when the show had first begun, with no need for someone to film from the backseat when a simple dashcam and Shane’s handheld camcorder suited their needs. Shane’s habit of sleeping through his alarm, Ryan’s love of very particular road trip snacks and their shared compulsion for stopping at every bizarre roadside attraction—“for the ‘Gram,” as Shane put it—meant they were used to waiting from time to time, though he and Shane tried to avoid it as much as possible out of courtesy for their friends.

The thought of not holding up the crew any longer than necessary took up Ryan’s attention until a set of pale lights nearly blinded him from the other lane.

“Shit, dude, I didn’t even see them coming,” Ryan mumbled, still blinking the stars from his eyes. They had passed so closely that he was sure either he or the other car had drifted onto the yellow line, but he made a sinking discovery when he tried to check for himself.

What had been a light dusting of snow when they had reached a certain altitude was steadily piling up, hills of pure white on either side of the road growing taller by the minute against the dark backdrop of twilight. When Ryan realized he could no longer see any tire tracks, the snow falling so quickly that they had been covered since the last car had passed through, he felt the first tendril of anxiety snake up his spine.

“It’s not much longer 'til we get there, right?” 

“I’d hope you would know that,” Shane said, but Ryan felt a wave of relief when he caught him typing the address into Google Maps anyway. “Says the Château Émeraude is another hour from here, and I don’t know if that’s taking into account the weather.”

Ryan’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “That’s fine.”

He could sense Shane’s concern for his well-being without even looking at him. “You sure?”

“It’s just getting a little hard to see, that’s all.” It was partly his own fault, having left his glasses on his bathroom sink and neglecting to put in his contacts that morning, but he thought it best if he didn't mention that and risk a scolding from Shane. 

If Ryan's voice had taken on a slightly higher pitch than normal, he just hoped his boyfriend wouldn’t mention it. 

The interior of the car was warm, with pleasant gusts of hot air circulating through and keeping out the bitter cold, but the thought of getting stuck in the dead of winter on a quiet mountain road nearly made Ryan shiver. 

“It’s getting dark. I just don’t want to end up stuck on the road and have some semi blow through here without seeing us until they’re picking our bones out of his grill at a truck stop.”

The vivid mental image caused Shane to burst out laughing, reminding Ryan of a certain woman and her levitating dog. “Jesus, Ry.”

“Don’t forget the ax murderers, either.”

“Oh yeah, these woods are probably crawling with ax murderers.”

It was exactly the sort of reaction Ryan had come to expect, but his throat still tightened against his will. “Could you… call somebody?”

Shane didn’t answer, not verbally, but the comforting hand on Ryan’s shoulder as he used his free thumb to scroll through his contact list said more than words ever could.

Ryan was too nervous to look at anything but the snow-covered path in front of him, waiting for the moment that a sharp curve would send them flying off the side of the mountain like _Thelma and Louise_ , but he still couldn’t help catching a few words and phrases from Shane’s end of the conversation. 

_“Yeah… Visibility is, like, zero right now… Ryan said the same thing… What was it called?... You’re sure? Positive?... You’re the best, man.”_

His hand never left the nape of Ryan’s neck, alternating between gently kneading the taut muscles there and grazing his fingers through Ryan’s short hair. Despite the twisting sensation in his gut that told him something terrible was about to happen, Shane somehow managed to ground him through his terrible sense of foreboding. 

“The Evergreen Lodge,” Shane said, so unprompted it took Ryan a moment to realize that he was no longer on the phone.

“Uh, what about it?”

“That’s where we’re staying tonight. Shouldn't be much further.”

Ryan whipped his head around, an argument bubbling in his throat that _no, we can’t delay shooting, people are counting on us, we have a schedule, I can make it,_ but one look at Shane’s face nipped those protests in the bud. He didn’t always have to confront his fears head-on when the cameras were off, as Shane always told him. There were times when he could simply bow out and set clear boundaries about what he was and wasn’t willing to do, and risking their lives in the middle of a snowstorm fell firmly into that category. 

“How much further?” He asked instead, and when Shane’s eyes crinkled at the edges, Ryan thought he must have been prouder of him for putting his foot down than he would have been for choosing to tough it out and keep going.

“He said it’s the only building out here for miles. If we haven’t seen it, that means we haven’t passed it.”

It was a comforting thought, a safe haven from the storm that wouldn't take hours to reach. He still felt some small measure of guilt, thanks in part to his craving for Honey Barbecue Fritos and how much time it had taken to find some, but he would have been lying if he pretended that an overnight getaway at some cozy, tucked-away cabin didn't sound like a dream come true in comparison to driving in a near-complete whiteout. 

_If we make it that far._

"Evergreen Lodge?" Ryan repeated, tapping the vinyl of the steering wheel.

A hand clasped over his own to quiet his restless fingers, comforting and warm, reminding him that his worries were nothing more than his anxiety manifesting physically and taking control simply because he allowed it to. 

They wouldn't crash. They wouldn't die. They wouldn't—

"Jesus!"

A dark figure loomed ahead on the side of the road, concealed by the snowdrift until it was nothing but a shadow. Far too broad to be human, it threatened to panic and bolt into the road at the first sign of headlights, just as Ryan had feared.

He slammed on the brakes.

“It’s that fucking moose I was talking about!” He shouted, pointing repeatedly in the direction of the strange creature. “O-or a bear!”

Shane, a little dazed from the sudden stop, squinted through the snowfall until he eventually started to giggle.

“Honey,” he said, gentle and sincere even while he removed his glasses to wipe at the corner of his eyes, “you’re not wearing your contacts, are you?”

The answer was clear enough that Ryan didn’t feel the need to indulge him with a response. Instead, he let his foot off the brake and allowed the car to slowly roll forward, refusing to hit the gas until he could be sure that no wildlife was about to come crashing through their windshield. 

The first thing he noticed was that it didn’t seem to be moving, even as the car approached and came too close to ignore. A brief image of a deer frozen in headlights flashed through Ryan’s mind, but it was too boxy for that, bulky and broad and low to the ground…

_Boxy._ It wasn’t an unfitting description, but 'perfectly square' might have been more appropriate.

Ryan let his head fall forward with a groan, knowing he wasn't going to hear the end of it for a long time.

"You are so," he began, allowing his heartbeat to slow to something vaguely resembling a normal human pace, " _so_ lucky I told you to put your feet down."

“At least now we know we didn’t pass it,” Shane said cheerfully as Ryan made a left turn, passing the elegant, hand-carved wooden sign engraved with several pine trees and bearing the words:

EVERGREEN LODGE  
EST. 1947

The lodge revealed itself just as suddenly as its sign had. The white-painted log cabin, with a blue tiled roof and a tower rising from the main building that served as a third story, looked like a cottage out of some fairy tale. Ryan might have mistaken that part for a chimney if not for the window, tall and narrow and giving away no hint of the unilluminated room inside.

He thought he had never felt so relieved in his life as when he finally pulled into one of the handful of parking spots in front of the building. It was so small, closer to the size of a large house than any hotel he had ever seen, that the limited parking must have been a nonissue. As a native of Los Angeles, it was a difficult concept for Ryan to wrap his head around.

“What if they don’t have any rooms left?” Ryan realized, feeling something drop in the pit of his stomach.

“Then Mary and Joseph will have to go looking for a manger.” Shane leaned over to kiss Ryan’s forehead as reassurance before reaching for his suitcase in the backseat. “C’mon. Worst comes to worst, we’ll sleep in the car, and it still won't be in the top ten worst places we’ve ever stayed while shooting.”

.

“All right, uh...” Ryan cleared his throat, adjusting his reflection in the camera until he could get a good shot of both himself and the surrounding bedroom. “As you guys might have noticed, this isn’t the Château Émeraude.”

Rather than the luxurious ski resort he and Shane had expected to spend the night in, the lodge seemed to be a relic from another time. He carried the camera at eye-level throughout the room, eager to take their viewers on a little journey—not that he could have taken them on a big one, considering the size of the room.

“Due to the weather conditions, we had to take a detour and stop here for the night at the Evergreen Lodge,” he continued. “But for some good news… Well, the guy downstairs who checked us in says this place is haunted. For the first time in Buzzfeed Unsolved history, we’re gonna have a mini-episode inside another episode. Episode-”

“-ception,” Shane said in unison with him from where he was stretched out across the king-sized bed.

Ryan hadn’t spent years as a film major to not recognize a good segue, so he ignored the interruption and shifted the angle of his body to include as much of Shane in the shot as possible. “It’s just me and the big guy this time. No crew, no sound guys, just the ghoul boys, a camera, and hopefully…” He paused for dramatic effect, waggling his eyebrows and sticking out his tongue. “Some ghosts.”

“The scariest thing we’re going to find here is this bedspread,” Shane remarked, glancing pointedly at the white floral comforter beneath him with enormous roses embroidered into the fabric. “This looks like something my grandma would have bought if she went colorblind.”

“As you’ve probably noticed,” Ryan said, piggybacking off of Shane’s comment but speaking straight into the camera, “this whole room is very, uh… Vintage?” Hideously 1950s was another way to put it, but Ryan didn’t want to be rude to their gracious host, even if part of him doubted the old man would ever find their video. “They swear the rest of the rooms have been updated at some point since Kennedy was assassinated, but they’ve taken special care of this one to try and stay as accurate as possible to what it looked like on the night of the infamous murder-suicide.”

The almost-film major in him also knew when and where to drop a bombshell, as well as how to hold for dramatic effect. The old man at the front desk—Gary?—had also appreciated the value of a good, hammy pause, like someone who had perfected the art of telling campfire stories to his grandchildren over the years, and Ryan had liked him immediately.

“Murder-suicide?” Shane repeated in mock disbelief, as if he hadn’t been standing right beside Ryan when they had first heard the story. “Tell us more, Ryan!”

Ryan rolled his eyes and returned to the desk at the foot of the bed. It was a rolltop, as old or older than anything else in the room. The oak was still in remarkably good shape for something that Abraham Lincoln might have written on, and Ryan was careful when he slotted the camcorder onto one of the shelves to avoid leaving any scratches on what might very well have been a valuable antique.

“When we first told him we were ghost hunters and he said this place had a ghost of its own, I was naturally a little skeptical,” he explained, ignoring the muffled laughter behind him. 

“Trying something new?” 

“Shut up, Shane. Anyway,” Ryan continued, holding up his phone for emphasis, “I was able to do a little fact-checking of my own after we unpacked and found some news articles, police reports, stuff like that. So far, everything seems to check out. I think we’ve got a legit spooky place on our hands that slipped under our radar until now.”

“Just because a real murder-suicide happened here doesn’t mean that it’s haunted,” Shane reminded him helpfully.

“Which brings me to our next point. The owner of this place didn’t want to appear on camera, but he said, and I quote, ‘ _No one, in the sixty-six years since the murder, has been able to stay in the tower all night_.’”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Shane groaned. 

Ryan was finally forced to turn around in the rickety old chair and confront him directly. “What?”

“Look,” Shane said, dragging himself into a sitting position and reclining against the wicker headboard. He crossed his denim-clad legs and clasped his hands behind his head, having already kicked off his boots shortly after they entered the room. “He seems like a nice guy, really, but this place isn’t exactly busy, okay? If we were poor, lost moose hunters, he probably would have told you that yes, there _are_ moose up in these mountains.”

“How can he be right about everything else and make up the ghost on the spot?” Ryan asked. “You really think he’d keep this place looking like a set from _Leave It To Beaver_ just for funsies? If there’s no ghost, that’s a terrible business plan, dude.”

Shane tilted his chin toward the ceiling again, closing his eyes as if to better help him focus. “Continue.”

“Joan Roberts,” Ryan said as he spun back around, reaching blindly across the surface of his desk until he remembered that he didn’t have a file to flip open. “Born in 1930 to a small family in Omaha, Nebraska. Described as a kind woman by her family in interviews, always willing to lend a helping hand even to a perfect stranger. After graduating from high school in 1947, she moved to California in search of work as a secretary. Now, I haven’t gotten permission to use these photos, but hopefully we can add them in post.”

Shane took his cue and moved to the end of the bed, closer to Ryan so he could properly see the photos he had found in the process of his research. One was a yearbook photo of a handsome young woman with dimples, curly bobbed hair and a string of pearls around her neck.

“This one they took after she moved to California,” Ryan prefaced, though it was probably unnecessary once he found the picture. It was the same girl, clearly, but a far more stylish one that had grown out her hair, plucked her brows, and discovered lipstick. She was sitting at the edge of a diving board in someone’s backyard, looking over her shoulder in a white, one-piece bathing suit and smiling at the camera in a way that could only be described as flirtatious.

“A cheesecake shot,” Shane supplied as he took a closer look. “This was probably super taboo back then, right? Even without any nudity.”

“It was definitely considered risqué for a secretary.”

“I like it,” Shane decided, handing the phone back to Ryan so he could return to his notes app. “She had a glow-up, was feeling cute and took some pool selfies. Who can blame her?”

“This picture was actually used to discredit her after the murder,” Ryan said, his mouth twisting into a frown. “You know. ‘Loose morals’ and all that dumb shit.”

“Yeah, well, people in the past were fucking stupid. We’ve explored that several times in other cases,” Shane answered as he returned to a more comfortable lounging position across the bed. “Slut-shaming is garbage and we don’t stand for that, Ryan.”

“Is it really even slut-shaming if you’re just judging a woman for taking a picture in a bathing suit?”

“It’s a fucking ridiculous, Puritan-ass version of slut-shaming,” Shane muttered in annoyance. “Go back to your _I Love Lucy_ and poodle skirts, assholes.”

Ryan, beaming with pride and feeling a swell of love in his chest for his pissed-off boyfriend, grinned to himself as he found his place again in his notes. “She moved to California in 1947 and found a job working for George McCullough, a businessman in Salinas who owned a textile factory. Born May 16th, 1911 in Poughkeepsie, New York. Married his wife Frances in 1935, had five children and another on the way by 1954.”

“Six kids?” Shane repeated incredulously, sitting up in surprise. “Jesus, had nobody invented hobbies yet?”

“Well, we know he had at least one,” Ryan grimaced.

“ _No_. Are you serious?”

“He drove three hours to meet his secretary at an out-of-the-way motel without telling his wife,” Ryan said with a cocked eyebrow. “I don’t think you have to be a master detective to piece that together.”

Shane groaned again, this time so loudly and deeply that Ryan feared the man downstairs might have heard it and assumed they were banging. “Men are terrible, Ryan. Just on a broad scale.”

“I know, Shane.”

“He was twenty years older than her! He was her boss!” Shane cried, throwing his hands in the air. “He was about to have his sixth kid!”

“I know, Shane,” Ryan repeated, reaching for his sock-covered foot and squeezing it. “But he gets his comeuppance in the end, if you want to look at it that way.”

“Bet his ‘textile factory’ was a sweatshop,” he muttered. 

“Okay, let’s maybe not say that,” Ryan said hurriedly, looking back to the camera and drawing a finger across his throat as a reminder to leave that out of the final cut. “Don’t know how much of his family is still alive or if that company became, like, Nike or something later on.”

He pretended not to notice Shane mouthing ‘sweatshop’ as he turned back around, deciding that just a little defamation couldn’t hurt so long as it was removed before the video was actually posted.

“You wanna see pictures of him, too?” Ryan offered.

“1940s asshole? Let me guess. Tall, white, mustache, wearing a bowler hat or some other douche-y shit.”

“Pretty much,” Ryan confessed, taking another look at it himself. “Fedora, not a bowler hat, but you got everything else.”

“God, that’s so much worse.”

“Very Clark Gable, but I guess all guys looked like that back then.”

“Then I’m good, thanks.”

“Well, the evidence points to Joan and George having an affair, which is also the conclusion the police came to,” Ryan read aloud, resting his chin in his hand. “No one has been able to figure out why they traveled so far to meet out all the way here, but what they do know is that Joan Roberts checked into Room 301 of the Evergreen Lodge around 6:30 p.m. on the evening of January 13th, 1954. George arrived almost two hours later and joined her up here. Neither of them ever checked out.”

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose, ignoring a familiar chill that traveled the entire length of his body. Murder was hardly new to either of them anymore, but he couldn’t recall the last time he had stood in a place where such a personal tragedy had occurred. There was a difference, it seemed, between hospitals and prisons where the ghost stories had long been twisted and distorted into legend, and knowingly standing in a place where two people had died a lifetime before.

“Shane?” He asked once he got his momentary sadness in check. “This one needs a little audience participation.”

Shane, seeming to remember his role after hearing the story earlier that evening, rose to his feet and padded across the carpeted floor to stand behind him over his right shoulder.

“The woman working at the front desk that night reported hearing a noisy ‘lover’s quarrel’ upstairs,” he said. “Joan seemed particularly upset, though she claimed she couldn’t make out anything they said. When everything went quiet for a minute, she thought the fight was over, or maybe one of them had decided to pack up and leave.” 

Ryan pushed out his chair a little and braced himself with a slow, deep breath. 

“That’s when the gunshot rang out.”

Fighting a sudden tightness in his chest, he reached for Shane’s hand and shaped it into a finger gun before putting it to his own temple. “It’s thought that George, who was known to travel with a pistol for self-defense, put the gun in one of the drawers of this desk when he arrived. When the owner of the hotel finally got the door unlocked, he was slumped over like this—” He draped his upper body across the desk with his arms at his sides, “—with a single bullet hole in the right side of his head.”

“Suicide,” Shane said automatically.

“That’s what they thought at first,” Ryan answered as he sat up again, rolling his shoulders. “But George was left-handed, which means he would have shot himself on the other side, and the gun was found all the way across the room. The most damning piece of evidence, however, was the open window.”

He and Shane turned in that direction, and Ryan made sure to adjust the camera to get a good shot of it. Flanked with curtains in the same hideous floral style as the blanket, the pane-glass window, with a white frame to match the outside of the building and a sill near the level of Ryan’s hip when he was standing, loomed ominously as a reminder of what it had witnessed decades ago. 

“In all the chaos over the gunshot, no one realized Joan had jumped until the police arrived and found her dead in the parking lot.” Ryan swallowed, unable to take his eyes away from the curtains that fluttered slightly, even when the window was closed. “It’s believed that they argued over George refusing to leave his wife, Joan shot him, then took her own life. They replaced the carpet, of course, but every other thing in this room is exactly how they left it that night.”

“Ryan?”

He shook his head once, feeling like he was snapping out of some sort of daze. “What?”

Shane hesitated, eventually placing a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “It’s been a long day for both of us,” he said. “Why don’t we get some rest and finish this tomorrow? Show up at the Château bright and early?”

Ryan knew Shane had somehow sensed the story was affecting him more than most, wondering not for the first time if his boyfriend was some sort of supernatural mind reader and refused to admit it. He rested his hand on top of Shane’s, then pressed his cheek there. 

“You’re just saying that because there’s no TV in here,” he teased.

“You know me too well, baby,” Shane answered, leaning forward to kiss the side of Ryan’s head before turning off the camera, still aimed squarely at the window. “I’m not trying to test that ‘I’m a psychopath without modern technology’ theory.”

“Shane,” Ryan chided, pressing the power button again and pointing the lens toward the bed. “Ghost evidence, remember?”

“Ryan,” Shane mimicked. Instead of turning the camera back off, however, he used Ryan’s exposed throat to his advantage and left a soft, open-mouthed kiss there. “Sex, remember? Unless you’re planning to release a _One Night in Ryan_ tape without telling me.”

“We have a rule about sex in a haunted house,” Ryan reminded him, letting his eyes slip shut and making no effort to stop him, “and the rule is we don’t do it.”

“Yeah, but we’ve broken that rule more times than we’ve actually stuck to it,” Shane murmured into his ear. He snaked both arms around the sides of the chair and slowly dipped them beneath Ryan’s hoodie, allowing them to wander the warm, hard muscles of his abdomen. “Besides, this isn’t even our haunted house, so it doesn’t count, and it’s not like there are many other ways to entertain ourselves.”

One of his hands traveled far enough north to pluck at Ryan’s nipple, causing him to gasp in surprise. With his eyes closed, it was so easy to forget the stress of the day—nearly crashing in a snowstorm, disappointing the crew, staying in a murder room—and Ryan had to appreciate the lengths Shane was willing to go to in order to distract him, even if it wasn’t entirely selfless.

“Does it turn you on?” Shane whispered, so quiet that Ryan had hardly realized he was speaking at all. “Knowing we’re being watched?”

Ryan’s eyes flew open and he choked on his own breath. “W-What?”

Visibly confused by Ryan’s startled reaction, Shane nodded toward the camera without a word.

“Oh.” He felt a flood of relief, remembering the growing dampness in his jeans and the effect their impromptu sex tape had on his arousal. “Sorry. You know I get jumpy in these places.”

Shane smiled, understanding like almost no one Ryan had ever known, and brushed a thumb across Ryan’s bottom lip. “I know, baby.”

He was only vaguely aware of the trail his clothes left across the floor, lost in the pleasure of Shane’s lips on his neck, across his chest, against the softness of his inner thighs. He wound his legs around Shane’s waist and moaned when his long, deft fingers entered him, followed shortly after by the blunt, delicious pressure of his thick cock pressing inside.

“Shane,” he breathed, gasping and shaking with every thrust. He clutched desperately at Shane’s bare back, leaving angry red marks in their wake that neither of them seemed to notice. "Shane, fuck, _yes_.”

Was he forgetting something? Did it matter? Was it important?

It couldn’t be. Not more important than the white-hot, cresting pleasure that threatened to overwhelm him every time Shane struck something inside of him that made him cry out.

He heard Shane’s name in his own voice, so distant and muddled that it almost seemed as if it were coming from someone else’s mouth. He writhed on the sheets and keened, feeling his climax approaching so rapidly he wasn’t sure if he would have time to warn him.

“Shane, I… Please... _Daddy_ …”

The realization of what he’d said hit him at the same moment as his orgasm, but Ryan didn’t have much time to reflect on either when the sound of rattling echoed across the room.

He opened his eyes in breathless confusion and watched the old desk shake so violently that it knocked the camera off the shelf. His first instinct was to wait out the earthquake from the safety of the floor, as had been drilled into his head all his life, but it became quickly apparent that none of the other fragile antique furniture was moving.

“Shane?” He whispered.

He turned his head just in time to watch the vibrating desk slow to a stop, showing no sign it had ever moved aside from the camcorder that had rolled across the carpet and came to rest against the baseboard beneath the window.

It was a moment Ryan would relive countless times, never quite sure how he kept from screaming whenever he remembered.

“You saw that, right?” He panted instead, rising up on his elbows underneath Shane. “That’s… that’s ghost evidence. Oh my God, Shane! We have it on film!”

Ryan watched him bite his lip to keep from laughing in the darkness, wondering when one of them had thought to turn off the lamp. “What we have is a sex tape, _maybe_ with some ghost evidence at the end. It’s the ultimate ghost hunter’s Catch-22. Does the whole world get to watch us bone so you can prove ghosts exist?”

The answer ultimately proved to be a resounding _no_ , though Ryan would be the first to admit he had struggled with the dilemma for weeks.

“I swear to God, the table started _shaking_ on its own,” he swore into the camera, growing more and more excited as he told the story again and gesturing wildly with his hands. “I thought it was an earthquake at first, but nothing else in the room moved an inch. Nothing.”

Shane took a long sip of coffee and diverted his gaze. “Just isn’t compelling.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if the battery hadn’t died,” Ryan said, smiling so broadly that he wondered if some eagle-eyed viewer might catch on that he wasn't telling the truth. “That does it for our very first double-episode of Buzzfeed Unsolved Postmortem. Make sure you watch the episode this Friday…”

He polished off a bottle of water once they stopped rolling and dragged a hand down his face, resting his sore elbows on the new Postmortem table. It was taller than he was used to and he kept banging against it, expecting it to be lower, but it was a small price to pay to keep their secret safely out of view.

“How you feeling, Ry?” Shane asked, looking him over with the same concerned expression he wore so often those days.

“I made it through the whole video without throwing up. I’m counting that as a success,” Ryan said hopefully as tripods were folded and laptops were closed around them. “The hardest part is almost over.”

“I don’t think anyone has ever considered morning sickness ‘the hard part’ when all was said and done,” Shane teased. 

“I’ve just started showing, okay? Don’t make me think about that hard part right now,” Ryan groaned as he rose to his feet. It was almost completely invisible unless he turned to the side and pulled his loose-fitting Lakers jersey more tightly across his belly. When he did, however, there was an unmistakable bump that he, as well as the rest of the staff, were determined to keep hidden from the public as long as possible. “Take me home, big guy?”

“Always, baby.”

Shane wrapped an arm across his shoulders and Ryan leaned into him as they left the room, already half-asleep and ready for a long afternoon nap on the sofa. The baby zapped his energy by noon most days, which the doctor had explained was normal, but it was a difficult adjustment for a night owl to try and get as much work done as possible in the early morning as he progressed through the second trimester.

Shane held open the door to the parking lot for him, and Ryan walked ahead to get out of the uncharacteristically cold weather.

“Gotta remember a hoodie next time,” he muttered to himself as he climbed into Shane's car. He was ready to fall asleep right there in the passenger seat, but the sound of several voices overlapping kept him from drifting off.

Traffic had stopped, he noticed. Police cars. A crowd of people standing right in the middle of the street.

_There must have been an accident. It’s gonna be a nightmare trying to get home._

Someone—a captain or a sergeant, Ryan guessed, based on the way the other cops parted around him—stepped forward with a roll of caution tape in his hand. There was an open space left behind him when he moved away, and he caught a fleeting glimpse of what had caused such a commotion.

A woman, lying face-down in the street in a pool of her own blood. She wore a brown tweed jacket, a knee-length skirt and heels, so old-fashioned and out of place that Ryan briefly wondered if it was a costume and he had stumbled upon a movie set. 

Despite everything else, it was the dark hair rolled into curls and piled on top of her head that set off an alarm in Ryan’s brain.

“Ryan?”

He jerked at the sound of Shane's voice, unsure of how long he had been in the car. A sudden wave of nausea made him want to roll down the window just to feel some cool air on his face.

“Shane, look.”

“Yeah, there was a car accident,” he said, watching as the onlookers were ushered back onto the sidewalk. “Heard about it before we started filming. It’s fine, though. Nobody was hurt.”

“What are you talking about? There’s—”

He never finished his sentence, however, as the crowd of people thinned out before his eyes and revealed no one on the asphalt, not a single drop of blood, nothing but shattered glass and an angry man yelling about whether or not his insurance was going to cover his busted windshield.

“There’s what, Ryan?”

Ryan forced himself to look away as sweat began to bead at his hairline in spite of the chilly weather. “Nothing. Just tired.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments and kudos will be loved and appreciated! ♡


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